


For the Sweetness It Gives

by pendrecarc



Category: The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
Genre: Canonical Character Death (mentioned), F/M, First Time, Last Time, M/M, Missing Scene, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:17:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5747566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winter in Fezana, summer in Silvenes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Sweetness It Gives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VanaTuivana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanaTuivana/gifts).



Winter in Fezana. The city lay hushed under a blanket of snow. Death was silent this season, unlike the bloody violence of that past summer and autumn; life bleeds away quietly under the knives of cold and hunger. The living waited for the spring thaw and the renewal of war in that city and across the peninsula.

The newest wing of the castle, washed clean not so long before of the blood of one hundred and thirty-nine of Fezana’s most distinguished citizens, had survived the summer siege and the city’s fall to Esperaña. Now it housed Valledan troops under the command of King Ramiro’s constable.

In the warmest bed in that wing, between fine linen sheets from the new governor of Fezana’s personal stores, Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda lay with her head on her husband’s shoulder and asked, “Are you in love with this man?”

She felt his chest rise and fall, slow and deep now that their lovemaking was done. It was in the lull afterward that he had spoken yet again of the enemy commander, prompting her to voice a thought that had been in the back of her mind since the summer, at first in jest and more lately in earnest. Now she waited for his answer, uncertain of what she wanted to hear.

“I suppose I am, in a way,” Rodrigo said at last. Something in her eased. There was pain as it went, but relief, too. “Isn’t that odd?”

She shifted then, raising herself on one elbow to look down at his face. The cold air moved into the space between them. Her hair fell forward and brushed his shoulder, the pillow, his ear. “You’ll go to meet him in the spring,” she said. “What is it that I always tell you?”

He blinked up at her. A moment before he had been easing toward sleep. Now he was wide awake, alert as any soldier called to his post in the night. “Miranda, I didn’t mean—”

“Did you not?” she asked him.

She watched his face change and knew that he hadn’t quite realized until now that he might in fact mean this, that he did not speak of Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais—Asharite, regicide, ka'id of the Cartadan forces, and, as her husband would not let her forget, poet—as a respected enemy or even a comrade in arms. Miranda couldn’t pretend to understand it. She had only met the man once, on a summer’s night outside this very city, and then she had been much occupied with other things. She did not think she would know ibn Khairan if she saw him again. But Rodrigo she knew.

“Tell me what it is that I say,” she said.

He sighed. “That if I bed anyone else, you will either bed another man or kill me.”

“Rodrigo,” she said, “tell me exactly what I say to you.”

He looked at her in confusion, and then his face went very still. There was understanding in his eyes, and wonder—and fear as well. “You tell me,” he replied, “that if I bed another woman, you’ll either bed another man or kill me.”

She smiled down at him. It broke her heart to do so, but it had broken before, and Rodrigo had always mended it. “I mean what I say.” She lay back down against him. His hand traveled up her spine, a familiar, welcome touch. “You would do well to remember it come the spring.”

He was quiet, his breath ruffling her hair. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I remember how you were when Raimundo died,” she said, “and I think you regret the things you didn’t do before you met me, before you lost him, before it was too late. I don’t want this man to be another such regret.” _And because I know how much blood will be spilled when this winter ends, my love, and I do not think both of you can survive it._ Her throat ached less from the words she had spoken than from those she held back.

“Miranda,” he said, as though it hurt him as well. “I never told you—”

But he had, of course, a hundred times and in a hundred different ways. Enough of this. She did not need him to admit things she had known for years. “And besides,” she interrupted, “I hear he is a beautiful man, this ibn Khairan.”

“Miranda—”

“Blue eyes, I am told. Rare for an Asharite. What was it you said, when I asked you the same about your physician? That you are trained to notice things about men and women.” She smiled again, more widely this time, her cheek shifting against his breast. “So tell me, Rodrigo. Is he beautiful?”

She felt his arm move, and though she could not see it she pictured him covering his eyes with one hand. “You’ll be the death of me. Yes, he is beautiful. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me more.”

“Miranda!”

“Why not? You’ve told me more than I ever wanted to hear about his swordsmanship, his horsemanship, his strategies, his _poetry_. I want to know what he looks like.”

“But why?”

“So I can imagine it,” she said, stretching slowly against him. She felt his breath stop, a shudder and then a stillness in his chest. “So that when you ride off to war and this man, when you leave me alone in our bed, I can close my eyes at night and see it.”

He took in air with a gasp like a drowning man. “Miranda. You will be the death of me,” he said again, this time in a raw and shaken voice.

_So long as he is not,_ she thought, as Rodrigo drew her up to him, as she responded to his growing urgency and twisted her hands in his hair, in Husari ibn Musa’s linen sheets. _So long as after you ride off to war and this man, you come home to me._

 

***

 

Summer in Silvenes. The city—what was left of it—slept fitfully with two armies camped at its gates. As a late dusk turned to true night, few walked the streets, and most that did darted from door to door with one hand on the hilt of a dagger or sword. Rodrigo Belmonte left his hands at his sides and walked at a steady pace, but he wore a plain cloak and a hat pulled low, and he watched every shadow that moved in the side streets.

His destination was an inn he knew well, or had known. Nineteen years ago Silvenes had still been the glory of Al-Rassan, and on a night like this music and low laughter would have spilled out from the houses he passed between. He reached the inn’s small courtyard paved with cracked stone, once scrubbed and polished so white it had hurt his eyes under the noonday sun, and looked up at the windows of the guest rooms. Only one was lit, a corner room on the third floor.

The landlord gave him a hard look as he came inside. As he’d been instructed, Rodrigo took a heavy coin from his purse and rapped it three times on the bar before laying it down. This won him a jerk of the head toward the stair. With an effort, Rodrigo ascended the steps only one at a time, though when he reached the third floor he found his pulse had quickened as though he’d taken them at a sprint.

He took off both his leather gloves before raising a bare fist to rap at the door.

“Come in,” called a soft voice in Asharic.

It was a harder thing than riding into battle, to open that door and walk inside.

Ammar ibn Khairan waited for him in the steady light of an oil lamp. He rose as Rodrigo entered and stood there, unsmiling and unspeaking, as they looked at one another. A man ought not to change much, Rodrigo thought, in the course of a single year. A difficult year, to be sure, filled with hunger and sleepless nights and desperate fighting, but they each had many such years behind them. If they had been passing acquaintances Rodrigo wasn’t certain he would think Ammar had changed at all. A little grey in his hair, of course, his face somewhat leaner, and in deference to anonymity he wore neither his rings nor his signature earring, but these were small things.

The real difference, Rodrigo thought, was in his eyes.

And then Ammar smiled, and Rodrigo wondered if he had imagined it. “I’d started to wonder if you would come.”

Rodrigo let out an incredulous laugh. “Did you think I would miss this? I’d have died of curiosity first.”

“That was my concern,” Ammar said. “That you had managed to get your throat slit by a cutpurse.”

“A glorious death for the Constable of Valledo. Would you have commemorated it in verse?”

“Assuredly. It would have been a poem for the ages.”

“Jad's light, Ammar,” Rodrigo said, “it is good to see you.” He moved to close the distance between them and was met halfway, his arms gripped and his own hands grasping with equal force. He peered into Ammar’s face, trying to read something of the last months in the shadows cast by the lamp. Then he dropped his hands. “How is Jehane?”

“Well. Heartsick. She will be glad you asked, and gladder still for word of her parents.”

“They are safe,” he said. “Both are well, but for worry over Jehane.”

“You may tell them there’s no need to worry while I live.”

“I have,” Rodrigo said simply.

Ammar dropped his chin, a half-nod. “And Diego?”

He smiled. “He bears a scar. That is all.”

Ammar’s eyebrows rose, first in surprise, then in wonder. “Jehane said it would be so. I never quite believed her.”

“Our clerics have declared it a miracle from the god.”

“Whose god do you suppose that is?”

Rodrigo could feel the pleasure bleed out of his smile. “A question I have asked myself more than once, believe me. You told me to pray to Jad that night, but it was an Asharite’s warning that brought us to Diego in time, and a Kindath’s hands that healed him.” He shook his head. “But you didn’t ask me to come alone and disguised to contested territory to discuss theology, or to get news of my son.”

“No.” Ammar stepped back, gesturing with one hand at the rough-hewn table behind him. This, a narrow bed, and two uneven stools made up the room’s only furnishings. “Sit. I brought wine.”

Rodrigo watched as he poured. The wine was a red, rich and smoky on the tongue, and remarkably fine. “Never tell me you bought this from the innkeep.”

Ammar’s mouth curled. “Hardly. If I told you the time and expense it takes to find a wine like this in Silvenes—that’s the real reason we are meeting here, by the way. I’ve gone months without anything as good. Hazem forbids wine in the officers’ tents, and of course the Muwardis do not drink. I’ve never known a battle-camp to be such a dry and joyless place.”

“What would they do to you if they knew you were here?”

“They want my head anyway,” he said, careless. “What they would do to _you_ , on the other hand…. But I have two flasks of this red with me. I’ve had nothing so good since we left Ragosa.”

Rodrigo turned the glass in his hands. It was an awkward, graceless thing, unworthy of what it held. “I thank you for sharing it, Ammar. Why are we here?”

Ammar ibn Khairan looked into his own glass and raised it for a long, lingering sip. “We are here so that I can tell you that tomorrow Yazir ibn Q’arif will send a herald to your king.” He set the glass down on the tabletop, where it listed oddly on the warped and pitted surface. “He will offer a challenge of single combat between the leaders of our two armies, to invoke the will of the gods on this battlefield. And I think, my friend, that Ramiro will accept.”

Rodrigo could not have said how long he sat there with a roaring silence in his ears. First he passed from disbelief to horror, then to a twisting fury, and came at last to a quiet grief. He was surprised at how dull and familiar it felt. But had he not known this would come, not felt it from the first moment he laid eyes on this man? “So,” he said at last, in a voice that sounded nothing like his own, “the god demands we place a seal on it, after all.”

“Whose god would that be?” Ammar asked again, then shrugged, a motion as dismissive as it was graceful. “I am here to tell you this, and to drink until this excellent wine is gone. Will you join me?”

The aftertaste of raspberries and wood-smoke had turned sour on his tongue. “What is the point?”

“Of good wine and company? This year has changed you more than I thought, Rodrigo, if you need to ask.”

Unsmiling, he stared across the table into ibn Khairan’s amused gaze. “Of single combat. What is ibn Q’arif hoping to achieve? If I kill you, will he step down and take his Muwardis back across the sea?”

Ammar arched one eyebrow. “I rather think it is your death he has in mind.”

He held with some effort to his self-control, keeping his tone clear and level. “Damn you, Ammar, don’t give me news that comes like a knife to the gut and make a joke of it. That is the difference between us.”

Ammar’s teeth flashed white in the lamplight. “You can think of only one?”

“The only one for which I can’t forgive you. My wife tells me I laugh too much at the things others would take seriously. You, Ammar—you laugh at the things that break your heart.”

Ibn Khairan stood and took three long strides across the room to the window, still cracked open to admit a warm summer breeze. For several minutes Rodrigo watched his back as he stood there, motionless, and then he dropped his gaze to the wine glasses. Ammar’s was nearly empty. He reached for the flask and refilled it. When this was done, Ammar turned back to him. He took his seat again, placing his palms flat against the table.

“What should I say to you?” he asked in a very low voice. “That I would rather cut off my hand than raise it against you? You know this, Rodrigo.”

In answer, Rodrigo reached across the table and laid his own hand on Ammar’s wrist. His fingers rested over callused skin stretched taut over muscles corded with strain; he let his thumb slip down to the pulse-point, felt the staccato rush of blood; and then he waited until the tension eased and the hand beneath his lay slack, until the pulse had settled and slowed under his touch. He permitted himself the luxury of that touch for several more heartbeats before saying, “I know it.”

“I should hate to think,” Ammar said quietly, “that there is anything between us you can’t forgive.”

And this Rodrigo answered just as simply, raising the hand in his grasp to his lips. He watched the long, elegant fingers close about his own, a motion born, he thought, more of startlement than anything else. He turned both their hands over, exposing Ammar’s palm to the flickering light, and pressed another kiss to the sharp creases where a hilt would rest. Only then he did he look up into a pair of eyes as unsettlingly blue as ever—though now they were unsettled, as well.

“Jad help me,” he said. “Have I surprised Ammar ibn Khairan?”

Ammar cleared his throat. “A rare feat, indeed, though it has happened before—and once or twice for much the same reason. I’ve told you why I asked you here tonight. Is this why you accepted?”

_No_ , Rodrigo almost said. That conversation with Miranda had faded, almost, from his memory, as the winter snows melted and the war resumed. He had heard of ibn Khairan’s appointment as ka’id over all the Asharites in Al-Rassan with a sort of weary resignation. Had he not known this, too, must happen? And in some sense it was Rodrigo’s own doing, for singling out Ghalib ibn Q’arif on the field of battle and riding him down, in payment for an early summer’s evening outside Fezanes. When, having been told the results of that death, he had next ridden out against the Asharites, he had remembered the things Miranda had told him, but he hadn’t allowed the thought to linger. For months he and ibn Khairan had battered and harried one another at every opportunity, but not even in the briefest of glimpses across the battlefield had he laid eyes on the man.

They had danced across the hills and valleys of Al-Rassan until Silvenes had drawn them both into its faded shadow. And that morning, with two armies drawn up on either side of a wide and waiting plain, a message had been delivered to Rodrigo Belmonte’s tent. It was unsigned, written in Esperañan, but he had known the handwriting at a glance. _Tonight, in the room where you once fell from a window._

Of course he had accepted. He had many reasons for doing so, and it would be a lie to say the things Miranda’s offer was not among them. “Not entirely,” he said. “But I won’t tell you it didn’t cross my mind.”

He let his eyes wander from Ammar’s, tracing the line of his nose down to his chin and throat, watching the hollow above his collarbone shift as he swallowed. Down a little farther, to the place where summer-brown skin disappeared into the neck of his robe. Impossibly, Ammar’s hand trembled.

It was Rodrigo’s turn to smile. “Are you going to tell me it didn’t cross yours when you wrote to me?”

“To own the truth, it did not. I too had received some bad news, you see.”

“And before that?”

“Before I was asked to spit you on my sword?”

“Yes,” Rodrigo said. “Before that. In autumn, in Badir’s court; in the winter, when we rode together; in the spring, in the streets of Ragosa—”

“Two days from now, I will do my best to kill you,” Ammar said, slowly, as though testing the words. Then he shook his head. “We should finish this wine. It is too good to waste. And then I should send you back to your king.”

“That is not an answer.”

“Rodrigo, what should I say to you?”

“That you have wanted this as badly and for as long as I have.”

For a moment, Ammar said nothing. Then he took his hand away and reached for his glass. Rodrigo had enough time to feel the bitter shock of it before Ammar set the glass down again, drained of its wine, and got to his feet. “Very well,” he said. Grasping the table by one end, he pushed it out of the way.

Rodrigo could not have said whether he rose or was pulled out of his chair. He clutched with one hand at Ammar’s shoulder, seized his hair with the other to pull them together as Ammar’s hands closed on either side of his ribs. He tasted the skin under Ammar’s lower lip, the wine on his tongue; he felt the curve of the back of his skull, the hard ridges of vertebrae at the nape of his neck. He took a step forward, but the hands at his sides held him back.

“Wait,” said Ammar’s voice in his ear. “I will not rush this.”

“How long do you think we have? There are thousands of men under our command. We will be missed.” _How long do we have, my dear, before I must try to put an end to you?_

“Even so. You asked if this ever crossed my mind.” Rodrigo could feel the warm breath on his neck, then the brush of lips as Ammar spoke. “If you want the truth, my friend, it did—a dozen times that autumn, a hundred that winter, and every hour of the day that spring, but not once did I imagine grappling with you in a race against the sand in the glass. I will take my time in this.” The hands tightened so the grip of each finger stood out individually against his ribs, then traveled slowly upward. So had Rodrigo often gentled a colt, each movement deliberate as it grew accustomed to his touch.

He thought made him smile. “As you like.” This time when he stepped forward, Ammar came willingly so they met thigh against thigh, shoulder against shoulder. Rodrigo drew a slow breath that expanded his chest, closing the small distance that remained between them. He let it out again, then pulled back just enough to fit their mouths together.

This kiss was slower, but for all that it was more heated, as Rodrigo let go of the desperation that had driven him this far and let himself enjoy it. As it ought to be enjoyed—he knew all too well how clever Ammar’s mouth could be, but it was one thing to watch him shape the words of a poem and another to feel that supple strength against his lips, one thing to hear him pitch his voice to carry across a banquet hall and another to catch a low, unstudied groan from deep in his chest. Rodrigo slid his hand down the back of Ammar’s neck so it cradled his jaw. No rasp of stubble. He had shaved carefully that evening. _Tell me again that you didn’t have this in mind when you wrote_ , Rodrigo thought.

Aloud he said, “I’ve stopped you laughing, at least.”

Another kiss, all too brief. “There should be laughter.” One of the hands broke from his ribs to travel slowly across his chest and come to rest over the buttons of his loose summer tunic. “There should be music outside, and silk sheets on a wide bed, and lanterns to light the dark corners of the room.”

“Is that how you imagined it?” Rodrigo slid his fingertips into the thick, curling hair, not so unlike Miranda’s. Then he shifted his weight so their hips came together, and he had to stifle his own groan. That much, at least, was nothing like Miranda. A fire was growing in his belly, banked down and smoldering.

“Sometimes. Alternatively, there should be a tent in the dead of winter, and the hard ground beneath us. And still music outside, the men singing around the campfire.”

“Not Jehane?”

“No,” Ammar said, his voice raw. His fingers were working busily between them. “No. She would be in the tent with us, you see.”

Now the fire leapt up, sending flares of heat up into his wrists, down into his groin. The buttons on his tunic came free, and a hand slid across the bare planes of his chest. He grasped in turn at the vest over Ammar’s robes and pushed it back over his shoulders. “I’m not sure,” he said between harsh gasps, “I ever appreciated how frustrating robes could be.”

Ammar’s teeth grazed his ear. “Allow me.” He grasped the fabric at his thighs and pulled it up until Rodrigo could help him, yanking the robe up and over his head. He wore a light wrapped skirt over his hips. Before Rodrigo could dispose of this as well, Ammar was working deftly at Rodrigo’s belt. When it came away, he paused. “Have you done this before?”

“With a man? No. To my everlasting regret.”

Ammar nodded, the considering look in his eye at odds with his rapid breathing. “Raimundo?”

Rodrigo blinked. “How did you know?”

“A guess. I heard you speak of him, once or twice.”

Rodrigo let out a chagrined huff. He could not seem to catch enough air to laugh. Evidently Miranda was not the only one who could read between his words. “And you, have you been with a man?”

Ammar grinned. “I thought you would know by now—most of the rumors are true.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Almalik?”

Ammar’s face went still, just this side of guarded. “Yes.”

“Which of them?”

“I liked it better when we were talking about Jehane.” Which was not an answer, but Rodrigo did not protest, especially when Ammar returned his attention to the waist of his trousers and began guiding him back toward the bed.

“Then let us by all means continue talking about Jehane,” Rodrigo managed. “Does she know where you are tonight?”

“Naturally I told her.”

His legs hit the mattress just as Ammar finished with his buttons. Rodrigo kept his feet for just long enough to shove the trousers down to his thighs, then fell back. He hit the bed with a solid thump. “But you didn’t tell her about this.”

Ammar looked down at him, eyes traveling slowly up along the bare skin of his legs, along his chest, to his face. So he had often looked at King Badir’s maps as they planned their winter campaign. Rodrigo’s mouth went dry. “She won’t mind. Or she might, but only that she wasn’t here to join us. And Miranda, how angry will she be, if you live to return to Valledo and tell her?” He leaned forward, planting a knee on the mattress beside Rodrigo’s thigh.

“I won’t have to survive so long for that,” Rodrigo said. “She is in our camp.”

Ammar stopped, arrested. “She’s here?”

“Yes.” He made to step back, and Rodrigo reached to take his face in his hands, holding him there. “What of it?”

“Never mind your king,” Ammar said. “I should send you back to your _wife_. In two days one of us will be dead, Rodrigo.”

“She has had me for the better part of twenty years, and for two children,” Rodrigo replied, running his thumbs up Ammar’s cheeks. “I'll be with her tomorrow night. She won't begrudge us these few hours.”

“From all I have heard, that seems unlikely.”

“Ah, but in your case I have special dispensation.”

He smiled as Ammar took this in. “I begin to think, Rodrigo, that I would have liked to know your wife much better.”

Before he could reply Ammar had leaned back over him, and the next few minutes were a heady blur of sensation. He had ached for this, but to draw a weathered palm along ribs and stomach, its smooth progress marred only by the occasional scar, was its own kind of longing. The last of their clothing discarded, he took Ammar in hand, marveling at the sigh it drew from his throat. He reached up to kiss the underside of his throat, then closed his teeth gently on the soft skin.

“Have a care,” Ammar said, with a lightness that belied the strain in every cord of his body. “Unless you mean to leave a mark.”

Rodrigo flicked his tongue between his teeth. “The Muwardis will think you have been with a woman, and they already know you to be the most dissolute man in Al-Rassan,” he pointed out. Then he bit down, this time none too gently. Taking the vicelike grip of the fingers in his hair as encouragement, he worked his way to the collarbone, alternating teeth and tongue, enjoying the tang of sweat and inhaling the faint lingering scent of Ammar’s perfume. “Besides, I want Jehane to know I have been here.”

Ammar’s cock leapt in his hand, and Rodrigo laughed. He encircled him with tentative, wondering fingers, and would have done more if Ammar hadn’t caught at his wrist.

“Not yet,” he said. “Lie back.” And he proceeded to make his own way down, though he did not stop at the collarbone. His mouth was as clever in this as in anything else, hot and insistent, his hands splayed wide over Rodrigo’s hips. Rodrigo heard his own breath coming in shallow pants, closed his eyes as his vision blurred. It was over too soon for him even to call out a warning. He spent in a rush, cradled between Ammar’s hands, between his lips.

He had still not recovered when the bed creaked, the other man crawling in beside him. Over him, more accurately. “I must apologize for the inadequacy of the accommodation,” Ammar said dryly.

“The bed was larger nineteen years ago,” Rodrigo replied, eyes still closed. “How did you know we stayed here?”

“I wasn’t in Silvenes at the time.” His voice caught as Rodrigo turned to him and thrust a leg between his thighs. He was rock-hard, and even that small friction sent a shudder through him. “I was—”

“Go on.” Rodrigo reached down and began slowly to move.

“I was—not here, or I think we would have met. I returned to the city just after Raimundo was called home. You were all they could talk about.”

“Truly? I did very little in Silvenes.”

“You jumped out a third-floor window and lived.”

“Yes,” Rodrigo said very seriously, opening his eyes at last to watch the play of light on Ammar’s face as his hand worked more quickly. “It seemed the wisest course of action. There were three men with knives in this room, you see.”

“No-one knew how you survived. I paid a man to show me the room. I found— _Ashar_. Rodrigo.”

“Yes.”

“Damn you,” he breathed, his own eyes squeezed shut. “I found the place where you had hammered a spike into the wall outside.”

“An old trick.” Rodrigo twisted his hand. “I know a few older. Tell me, when you lie with Jehane, does she—” But Ammar reached across the bed to pull him into another kiss, and they swallowed the words between them.

It did not last long after that. Ammar gasped into his mouth, and Rodrigo wrapped him in his arms as he shook with release. _And I must kill this man,_ he thought, feeling the heave of a warm and living chest against his own, pressing his face into a sweat-slick shoulder.

The lamp guttered and died. Neither of them rose to trim it.

It was not until much later that he found the strength to say, “Ammar, if I die—no, be still. If I die my wife will have a hundred fifty men at her back and a king’s word that she will be safe. If you die, Jehane has nothing.” There was silence. “I’ll send Alvar to her. Tell her to go with him if you fall.”

“I don't intend to make it easy for you, my friend.”

“I couldn't love you so well if you did.”

“Rodrigo,” Ammar said, “I'll tell her, but my dear, you must forgive me. I will not weep with you tonight.”

“I do not think I can laugh.”

By morning he would be back in his own camp to make explanations to his wife and excuses to his officers. By noon heralds would assemble on the open plain outside Silvenes. By nightfall they would hold Miranda and Jehane in their arms, and at sunset the next day they would ride to meet one another for the last time.

_Come, brother,_ Ammar would say, an echo of Rodrigo’s own words that first day in Ragosa. _Shall we show them how this is done?_ And soon after, one of them would fall.

“Sleep, then,” said the gentle poet’s voice, and Rodrigo turned in the bed, tangling them together. “It will be dawn soon enough.”

**Author's Note:**

> _Apology_
> 
>  
> 
> Don't cross me off as fickle  
>  because a singing voice   
> has captured my heart.  
> 
> One must be serious sometimes  
>  and lighthearted at other times:  
> 
> like wood from which come  
>  both the singer's lute  
>  and the warrior's bow.
> 
> by Ibrahim ibn Uthman  (12th Century, Córdoba)  
> tr. Cola Franzen


End file.
